I am pleased to announce that the Washington-Hickman Academic Questionfest (WHAQ) set will be available for mirrors nationwide (and internationally too, if there’s interest)! WHAQ will be a regular difficulty set that is written by current and former members of the quizbowl teams at Washington and Hickman High Schools in Missouri. The set will be head-edited by myself (Jacob O’Rourke); the rest of the editing team is David Dennis, the head coach at Washington (the classical music, current events); Andrew Wang, formerly of the University of Illinois (Biology, Chemistry); Seth Ebner of Washington University in St. Louis (Physics, Other Sciences, Visual Arts, some Religion); and Chris Chiego of the University of Pennsylvania (Geography and Social Science). Sean Phillips and Eric Mukherjee are also helping supervise the set to make sure no answers of inappropriate difficulty slip through.

We’ll be providing 14 packets for the cost of $10 per team that attends your tournament. If you mirror our tournament, I expect you to have statistics posted within a week of your tournament happening (and the statistics should be posted in a post on the thread for your tournament). We will also be offering a discount of $1 off per team (that attends your tournament) for you to scan and email your scoresheets to me at my email.

The set is currently at 70% written and 33% edited. I’ll be posting periodic updates about our progress until the set has been written and edited fully. This set will be available from September 17, 2016 until a few days before the 2017 HSNCT. I'll be posting the set shortly after that.

I plan on playtesting the tournament and submitting it to PACE’s Question Set Certification Program.

Set Details:

The tossups in the set will be powermarked and will run from 5 to 6 lines before the powermark is applied. The bonus parts will be no longer than two lines long.

Each packet will consist of 21 tossups and 21 three-part bonuses, distributed as follows (thanks go to Jason Loy for some of the distributional ideas):

1.5 American Lit (1 tossup and 1 bonus, plus an additional tossup or bonus in each packet)
1.5 British Lit (1 tossup and 1 bonus, plus an additional tossup or bonus in each packet)
1 European/World Literature
1 U.S. History
1 European History
1 World History
1 Miscellaneous History (this is ancient history and questions that don’t fit neatly into one of the other history categories, or just more of U.S., European or World History)
1 Biology
1 Chemistry
1 Physics
1 Other Science
1 Classical Music
1 Visual Fine Arts
0.5 Miscellaneous Arts
1 Geography
1 Trash
1 Myth
1 Religion
0.5 Philosophy
0.5 Social Science
0.5 Current Events
1 Extra Question (This will come from any category other than Trash)

Mirroring:

I’d love for as many circuits as possible to have a mirror of this set. If you’d like to mirror this set, please email me at jacob.orourke.7@gmail.com with the subject line “WHAQ Mirroring” to help me make sure I don’t lose it in my email.

We have a mirror for the Varsity division of Penn's Quaker Fall Open on December 3rd. We're still looking for plenty of mirrors, so if you don't see a mirror in your area, please email me about using the set!

Because we're almost done with writing and editing one of the big three categories, I'd like to ask for anyone interested in playtesting the literature for this set to email/PM/facebook message me with your availability for the week of July 11th-17th. It's much more helpful to me with my schedule to be told things like "I'm available on Thursdays starting at 8:30 in the evening" than non-specific things. We'll likely be doing the playtesting in an IRC channel whose name I am not revealing. Thanks to everyone who helps to playtest the set!

Since I was looking through our answer doc and was reading a previous set announcement from last year, I thought it would be good to mention this: answerlines will appear more than once in this tournament. There won't be things like two myth questions on Hercules, but there could certainly be a social science and a history question on "Japan," to use an example.

I know most tournaments use this approach, but I wanted to get this information posted so that no teams are surprised by this.

Because we are at 92% written and 47% edited (as of my posting this), I'm pleased to announce that the set will be available for mirrors starting on September 24, 2016. It will be available until a few days before the 2017 HSNCT, and it will be posted shortly before nationals.

If anyone is interested in playtesting this set, I'm starting the literature playtesting on Wednesday. Let me know via email/forum PM/facebook message and I will give you the channel name I am using.

I updated the list of who's helping to supervise and the list of editors because I've forgotten to say that Chris Chiego has joined the editing team as the editor of the Geography and the Social Science (along with passing along comments about other categories) and that Eric Mukherjee and Sean Phillips are overlooking the set to make sure nothing slips through.

A few updates: First, the set is currently at 86% edited. Lastly, we have added a mirror in the Kansas City-area. Fort Osage High School will be serving as the Kansas City-area host for WHAQ, using the set for their Three Trails Tournament on November 19th.